JERUSALEM, Sept. 8 (UPI) -- Nine years after he assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, in a successful bid to scuttle the peace process, Yigal Amir is demanding conjugal privileges.
He claims he married a mother of three, a divorcee who is several years older. Wednesday the two appeared at the High Court of Justice in Jerusalem demanding they be allowed to have sexual relations behind prison bars.
The idea that the prime minister's murderer be allowed to produce offspring angered some Israelis.
"Yigal Amir should not be allowed to lead a normal life because he denied the state a normal life. Restricting his ability to produce children is justified," Knesset Member Yuli Tamir of the dovish Labor Party told United Press International.
At the other end of Israel's political spectrum, Zvi Hendel of the National Union, said the prison authorities should treat Amir as they treat "every murderer." Dangerous criminal prisoners denied leaves are allowed conjugal relations and a cell 3 meters (3 yards) from Amir's is used for it, a Prisons Service officer told UPI.
Amir, however, is considered a security prisoner and they are denied such privileges.
The state, which opposes Amir's demand, says he is still a dangerous person and it cannot let its eyes -- and cameras -- off him. His attorney, Sean Caspar, suggested the authorities plant microphones between the sheets and under the pillow to make sure he does not seize the opportunity to send messages to his supporters, and the judges postponed their decision.
Amir, a former student at the orthodox Bar Ilan University in Ramat Gan, murdered Rabin at the end of a peace rally in Tel Aviv. He waited near Rabin's car, went up behind him and aimed at the seam in the back of the prime minister's jacket. Then he fired three shots.
Amir has been in solitary confinement first in Beersheba and now in Ramla, near Tel Aviv. He has a cell filled with religious books and a small yard covered with a canopy for a daily half hour walk.
Cameras monitor every move he makes, round the clock.
His fiancée, or wife as he claims, is Larissa Trembovler, a short, frail-looking woman with large eyelids and thin eyebrows. Trembovler immigrated from Moscow in 1989, and earned a doctorate in philosophy from the Hebrew University.
In an interview, Wednesday, she said that in Russia, too, she had helped political prisoners.
The night Rabin was murdered, "I just finished writing a historical novel, was absorbed in it and when I heard (of the murder on the radio) I did not grasp what had happened," she said.
"I was surprised by the result (that Rabin died) ... and I considered it all a great tragedy. ... Then I felt I could not stay on the sidelines," she continued.
"As one raised on dissident literature I could not stand that everybody is against someone ... demonizing (him). I wasn't interested in who he was. What he is. I considered it a tragedy."
She said she met the family "to encourage them" then met Amir "and didn't imagine it would develop in this direction. ... I wasn't looking for a match. I was a married woman. ... It was a distant contact with no idea (it would develop into) a romantic relationship," she told UPI.
She won a divorce when, she said, they felt their relationship "exhausted itself" and came close to Amir.
"I find him a completely different person (than his public image)," she said. "A sensitive man, responsible, one who thinks deeply."
The prison authorities opposed their meetings but the two won a court order allowing it, through two wardens remain within earshot.
The prison authorities also rejected their request to wed, but Amir and Trembovler said they got around that too.
Yigal Amir's father, Shlomo, said his son had asked him to buy a ring, which he did with his son's money to conform with Jewish law. A fortnight ago, acting Yigal's behalf, he performed the marriage rites in the presence of 10 witnesses including a rabbi.
This procedure is highly unusual but is not clear-cut, a senior rabbinical source told UPI. Amir and Trembovler appealed to a rabbinical court to recognize the marriage, but the source said he believed the case would eventually reach the supreme rabbinical court.
Five prison guards Wednesday morning sat on a bench separating Trembovler and Amir who was in the prisoner's dock in a brown uniform. During much of the hearings, another guard blocked their line of sight.
Caspar complained the authorities were ignoring Amir's rights, which should be greater than those of other criminal prisoners because he is entitled to no leaves. Except for a weekly meeting with Trembovler and use of the phone 15 minutes a day, "he has no contact with the outside world," Caspar said.
Government attorney Shai Nitzan told the panel of three Supreme Court judges that Amir was still a security threat. "He continues to express ideas that support terror, continues to advocate attacking heads of state and hurting Arabs," Nitzan said.
"Ideological prisoners" want to achieve their goals, "even when they are in jail," he noted.
The authorities are not afraid Amir would smuggle a gun out into his cell, but are concerned that people outside are waiting for his messages, Nitzan argued.
"There are tens, maybe hundreds of people who believe he saved the Jewish people and are waiting for his directives," Nitzan added.
"True there are people out there who think he did the right thing," Caspar agreed. However, he added, "It's not an organization. ... These are individuals."
It's not the numbers that count, Nitzan insisted. It took only one person to murder a prime minister, and one person -- Baruh Goldstein -- to assassinate 30 Muslim worshippers in the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, he noted.
"If I would have been convinced no one cares about Yigal Amir, I'd be calm, but the facts and classified material prove (otherwise), he said. Amir could use Trembovler to send out messages.
Caspar said the two would have intercourse in "a sterile room," with no paper, no pens and after both undergo a body search so there would be no way to send out messages.
"They'll make love quietly, without talking, as the Halaha (Jewish religious law) prescribes," Caspar said.
"We agree recordings be made at the moment of intercourse with microphones in the pillow and between the sheets," he added.
Nitzan insisted the two could whisper or signal to one another. "I haven't heard of a recording device that could hear a whisper directly into one's ear," he said. Right-wing extremists attended the hearing and a soldier, a spitting image of Amir, sat beside Trembovler.
It was Yigal Amir's brother, Sagiv, a first sergeant in the Nahal infantry brigade, trained to be a sniper.
